Authoritarian El Salvador

Erik Ching

Description

In December 1931, El Salvador’s civilian president, Arturo Araujo, was overthrown in a military coup. Such an event was hardly unique in Salvadoran history, but the 1931 coup proved to be a watershed. Araujo had been the nation’s first democratically elected president, and although no one could have foreseen the result, the coup led to five decades of uninterrupted military rule, the longest run in modern Latin American history. Furthermore, six weeks after coming to power, the new military regime oversaw the crackdown on a peasant rebellion in western El Salvador that is one of the worst episodes of state-sponsored repression in modern Latin American history. Democracy would not return to El Salvador until the 1990s, and only then after a brutal twelve-year civil war.

In Authoritarian El Salvador: Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880-1940, Erik Ching seeks to explain the origins of the military regime that came to power in 1931. Based on his comprehensive survey of the extant documentary record in El Salvador’s national archive, Ching argues that El Salvador was typified by a longstanding tradition of authoritarianism dating back to the early- to mid-nineteenth century. The basic structures of that system were based on patron-client relationships that wove local, regional, and national political actors into complex webs of rival patronage networks. Decidedly nondemocratic in practice, the system nevertheless exhibited highly paradoxical traits: it remained steadfastly loyal to elections as the mechanism by which political aspirants acquired office, and it employed a political discourse laden with appeals to liberty and free suffrage. That blending of nondemocratic authoritarianism with populist reformism and rhetoric set the precedent for military rule for the next fifty years.

Sujets

• American Government
• 20th Century
• Modern
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• Modern history
• Federal government of the United States
• General officer
• Latin America
• El Salvador
• Central America
• SS Central America
• General
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Salvador

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 janvier 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268076993
• Langue: English

Extrait

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AUTHORITARIAN EL SALVADOR
Politics and the Origins of the Military Regimes, 1880–1940
ERIK CHING
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2014 by University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 www.undpress.nd.edu -->
All Rights Reserved
E-ISBN: 978-0-268-07699-3
This eBook was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail] Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ching, Erik Kristofer. Authoritarian El Salvador : politics and the origins of the military regimes, 1880-1940 / Erik Ching. pages cm.—(From the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-268-02375-1 (pbk.)—ISBN 0-268-02375-1 (paper) 1. El Salvador—History—Revolution, 1932. 2. El Salvador—History—1838–1944. 3. Authoritarianism—El Salvador—History. 4. Military government—El Salvador—History—20th century. I. Title. F1487.5.C54 2013 972.8405'2—dc23 2013030743 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources . -->
To JACK and DAVID
CONTENTS
List of Tables ix -->
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations xi -->
Acknowledgments xiii -->
Maps xviii -->
Introduction 1 -->
CHAPTER 1. The Rules: Formal and Informal 35 -->
CHAPTER 2. National-Level Networks in Conflict in the Nineteenth Century 77 -->
CHAPTER 3. Building Networks at the Local Level 101 -->
CHAPTER 4. Municipal Elections and Municipal Autonomy, ca. 1880–1930 139 -->
CHAPTER 5. The Network of the State: Meléndez-Quiñónez, 1913–1926 173 -->
CHAPTER 6. Facing the Leviathan: Pío Romero Bosque and the Experiment with Democracy, 1927–1931 208 -->
CHAPTER 7. Politics under the Military Regime, 1931–1940 246 -->
CHAPTER 8. Populist Authoritarianism, 1931–1940 287 -->
Conclusion 336 -->
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography Index 453 -->
TABLES
Table 1.1 . Voting in Cuscatlán Department, Vice Presidential Election, 1895
Table 1.2 . Assembly Elections, Izalco Parish, December 1870
Table 1.3 . Deputy Election, Atiquizaya District, December 30, 1883
Table 1.4 . Main Transfers of Power between Rival Networks at the National Level, 1841–1903
Table 1.5 . Results from Sonsonate City, Presidential Election of December 1841
Table 3.1 . Municipal Officials, Santo Domingo de Guzmán, 1896, 1900, 1901
Table 3.2 . Election Results in Nahuizalco during the Years of Indian Rule, 1885–1901
Table 3.3 . Municipal Councils in Cuisnahuat, Sonsonate Department, 1885–1899
Table 3.4 . Election Results, Cuisnahuat, Sonsonate Department, 1900, 1901, 1903
Table 4.1 . Election Results, Ataco, Ahuachapán Department, 1883
Table 4.2 . Municipal Election, Guadalupe, San Vicente Department, December 1849
Table 4.3 . Municipal Election, Juayúa, Sonsonate Department, December 1886
Table 6.1 . Nullification Proceedings Conducted by the Ministerio de Gobernación, 1913–1930
Table 6.2 . Local Affiliates of Candidates in the 1931 Election Who Had Served on Municipal Councils under the PND between 1920 and 1925
Table 7.1 . Municipal Officials Elected in Juayúa, 1921–1939
ACRONYMS AND ABBREVIATIONS
AGN
Archivo General de la Nación, San Salvador, El Salvador
AGS
Archivo de Gobernación Sonsonate, El Salvador
AMI
Archivo Municipal de Izalco, El Salvador
AMJ
Archivo Municipal de Juayúa, El Salvador
AMS
Archivo Municipal de Sonsonate, El Salvador
ARENA
Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Nationalist Republican Alliance)
CN
Colección de Nulos
FA
Fondo Alcaldía
FO
Foreign Office
FRTS
Federación Regional de Trabajadores Salvadoreños (Regional Federation of Salvadoran Workers)
FWTP
Frederick William Taylor Papers, UCLA Dept. of Special Collections
IFC
Ismael Fuentes Collection
MG
Ministerio de Gobernación
ORDEN
Organización Democrática Nacionalista (Nationalist Democratic Organization)
PB
“Pre-Burn” Collection
PCN
Partido de Conciliación Nacional (National Conciliation Party)
PCS
Partido Comunista Salvadoreño (Communist Party of El Salvador)
PND
Partido Nacional Democrático (National Democratic Party)
PRO
Public Record Office, London, England
PRUD
Partido Revolucionario de Unificación Democrática (Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification)
RG
Record Group
RGASPI
Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow, Russia
SI
Sección Indiferente
SRI
Socorro Rojo Internacional (International Red Aid)
SS
Sección Sonsonate
SSV
Sección San Vicente
USNA
United States National Archives, Washington, DC
WNRC
Washington National Record Center, Suitland, Maryland
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Any project in the works as long as this one will invariably accumulate much indebtedness. As I take this opportunity to consider the debts I have accrued along the way, I find it personally humbling and professionally eye-opening to realize the amount of support from individuals and institutions that is necessary to bring a project like this to fruition. Researching, writing, and revising are solitary efforts, but they only occur because of highly collective networks of support.
In a reverse chronology, I open with those who most recently helped to make this possible. The first is my home institution, Furman University, which granted me a yearlong sabbatical award for 2011–2012 that made time available for the final round of revisions. Since completing the initial version of this manuscript as a dissertation at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1997, I have worked steadily but intermittently over the years on revising it into a book. Meanwhile, I was drawn into various other projects on Salvadoran history. In fact, I was embarking on yet another of those for my sabbatical when Scott Mainwaring, editor of the series in which this book is being published, contacted me to tell me he had been working on a new study in comparative politics, and El Salvador was one of his cases. He suggested I submit my work to the University of Notre Dame Press. As a result, I directed a portion of my sabbatical leave towards completing the revisions to this project. I would like to thank Scott for his support and for encouraging me to set aside another new endeavor and focus on this one.
The research for this project was done under the auspices of various institutions and organizations. The Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the History of the Western Hemisphere from the American Historical Association funded my exploratory trip to the Salvadoran archives. The subsequent yearlong trip was made possible by a Fulbright grant, which also included trips to Moscow and London. The writing of the initial version of this study, my dissertation, was done with grant support from the history department and the graduate division at UC Santa Barbara, and from the Academy for Educational Development.
All of the publication projects that I have undertaken since arriving at Furman have informed this project and made it better and more contextualized. Thus, the research endeavors for those projects are somewhat synonymous with this one. Fulbright, once again, supported an extended research trip to El Salvador in 2005, and the Research and Professional Growth Committee